Daniel Day-Lewis's record-breaking triumph and wins for Ang Lee and Life of Pi
make the 2013 Oscars one to remember, says Robbie Collin.

When Daniel Day-Lewis was honing his craft at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in the late 1970s, I wonder if he looked at photographs from the Academy Awards, of Richard Dreyfuss winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Goodbye Girl, or Jon Voight for Coming Home, and thought to himself: one day, Daniel, one day?

Well, whatever Day-Lewis thought of the Academy then, he has every reason to feel fairly warmly disposed towards them now. Last night, theypresented him with a historic third Best Actor Oscarfor his performance as Abraham Lincoln in Steven Spielberg’s august Presidential biopic. He is now the only man to have won three leading-role Oscars in the ceremony’s 84-year history: Marlon Brando, Jack Nicholson and Gary Cooper each have two; Robert De Niro has one. Only Katharine Hepburn, who won Best Actress four times between 1933 and 1981, has more.

His other two Oscars are for There Will Be Blood (2007) and My Left Foot (1989), and his performances in all three of these films are the fruit of the now legendary commitment and intensity Day-Lewis brings to every role. But more important than the tales of method madness– three months in a wheelchair to play Christy Brown, an apprenticeship in butchery for Gangs of New York – is the simple fact that he is an actor who understands the warp and weft of cinema better than any other, today and perhaps ever.

Only Day-Lewis could play as iconic a figure as Lincoln and somehow transcend the iconography. The reedy voice, the stooping gait, the wheedling anecdotes that end with a viper-strike moral: in his hands, these all felt utterly original and ineffably human. His Lincolnchanged the way we think of Abraham Lincoln, just as his acting continues to change the way we think of cinema.

Aside from Daniel Day-Lewis, Spielberg’s Lincoln was almost completely overlooked, confirming its status as this awards season’s unlikeliest serial runner-up. (Although if Spielberg had made Lincoln in the early Nineties, when the Academy loved films like Dances with Wolves and The English Patient and Spielberg’s own Schindler’s List, it could well have swept the board.) Instead, Best Picture went toArgo, of course, capping an unbroken victory lap for Ben Affleck’s roaringly enjoyable hostage thriller which began with its triumph at the Golden Globes in January.

Argo’s victory continues the Academy’s inclination towards smaller, leaner, cheekier films over their more traditionally Oscar-ish rivals: think plucky Slumdog Millionaire beating galumphing Benjamin Button, or The Artist’s improbable sweep. Lacking as I do the acting skills of Daniel Day-Lewis, I would be hard-pushed to convince anyone that Argo was the finest of the Best Picture nominees, but its victory will ensure this much-loved but still (in the UK at least) only moderately successful film finds a deservingly large audience on DVD.

Life of Pimay not eclipse the Best Picture winner’s thunder, but it was the night’s overall victor, taking four Oscars to Argo’s three: Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography and Best Visual Effects. Ang Lee continues to be the most chameleonic and globally cognisant filmmaker of our time (who else could have made both Sense and Sensibility and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon?), and to me his film represents the greatest achievement of all the Best Picture nominees: taking a novel long described as unfilmable and transforming it into a richly and naturally cinematic experience. It has also made £385 million worldwide, the most by far of any Best Picture nominee. The 85th Academy Awards was a night of no real upsets, but Daniel Day-Lewis and Ang Lee have ensured it has been one to remember.